With the end of January we reached the middle of our effort in terms of days, but certainly not in terms of calories. The 7,568 calories we have managed to grow and eat from our yard since August 1 of last year represent .5 percent of our annual count, or about two days worth of food for us. In terms of the 15 percent goal, it is equivalent to 12 days at that rate.
Winter’s been good so far. We’ve been able to eat a variety of vegetables from the yard fairly regularly: Bull’s Blood Beets, Autumn King Carrots, Little Gem Romaine Lettuce, Marvel of Four Seasons Butterhead Lettuce, Correnta Spinach, Fordhook Giant Swiss Chard, Mammoth Melting Sugar Peas, Green Sprouting Calabrese Broccoli. It’s all tasty good stuff, but it doesn’t add up too fast when charting calories. And, we’re looking at another lull in production, just like at the start of our cool season crop, with nothing really ready to eat for a little while.
We achieved the .5 percent Saturday night, sharing two soups with my parents, sister, and grandpa. We cooked the split pea soup we made a month or so ago (see “A whole meal of food”, posted Dec. 8), and we tried a new potato-chard soup. Chard is the only crop we have in abundance, so we’ve been eating more chard than I ever imagined — which is easy, because I never imagined anything about chard. We have also experimented with a sauted chard and look forward to trying a chard-tomato casserole in the coming week.
Hopefully the chard will sustain us until the next round of winter crop comes in.
Just got Citizenship Papers by Berry, amazing perspectives. Unfortunately my worms have all died save a giant earthworm I put in the bucket so it may be some time before I’m able to reproduce them for your compost. Trying to find an alternate source for you close to where you live I’ll let you know how that turns out. You should turn your pile for maximum through-put though, it becomes dirt much faster that way and is less likely to harbor dangerous pathogens due to the high process-heat of the aerobic microbes. I imagine the chickens will probably increase your caloric intake from the garden, but be sure to account for their feed and where IT comes from. Trying to
No worries on the worms. I’ll start turning that pile right away. Planned to this past weekend, but ran out of time.
I will definitely be watching where the chicken feed comes from. I’m hoping to grow a good portion of their food, too. They should also be able to find some of their grub scratching around the yard. At least I hope so …